As a young woman, Jean Kilbourne was brilliant (with a perfect score
on the verbal part of the SAT), well-educated, and ambitious. But after
graduating from Wellesley, she could only find secretarial jobs or work
for employers who wanted sexual favors. Eventually she created her own
work—deconstructing advertising. Many of us first encountered Kilbourne
in her electrifying film Killing Us Softly, which changed forever
the way we viewed ads about women. But later Kilbourne expanded her analysis
to include such things as how ads affect our values, relationships, and
commitments to civic life.

In her new book Deadly Persuasion: The Addictive Power of Advertising,
she debunks the idea that any of us is uninfluenced by advertising. Ads
succeed so well, she writes, precisely because we don’t think they’re working
on us. She reports that average Americans see over 3,000 ads per day and
spend over three years of their lives watching tv commercials whose messages
work their way inside our intimate relationships, our homes, our hearts,
and our heads. As a result, she argues, our culture increasingly has adopted
what John Maynard Keynes called “the values of the casino,” whereby, Kilbourne
writes, “relationships flounder and addictions flourish.” The addict is,
after all, the ideal consumer, and when an addict gets well, someone loses
money.

Kilbourne demonstrates how ads encourage us to objectify each other
and to believe that our most significant relationships are with products.
By implying that happiness comes from products, advertisers exploit our
real human desire for connection, calm, respect, and excitement, leaving
us romantic about objects and deeply cynical about humans, who are after
all, much more complicated than products. (“Who says guys are afraid of
commitment?” one ad inquires. “He’s had the same backpack for years.”)
Over and over, ads tell us that human relationships are fragile, difficult,
and disappointing but that products won’t let us down. (“The ski instructor
faded away three years ago, but the sweater didn’t.”) “Ads turn lovers
into things and things into lovers,” as Kilbourne succinctly puts it.

Because of their impressionability, children, of course, are advertisers’
favorite target. Twenty years ago, kids drank twice as much milk as soda.
Thanks to ads, today the reverse is true. Both alcohol and cigarette companies
target young children as consumers (Joe Camel, Spuds MacKenzie, and the
Budweiser frogs are all aimed at kids) and sell them sugary, fruit-flavored
“entry-level” drinks like Mrs. Pucker’s Alcoholic Orangeade and Tumblers,
a 24-proof version of jello shots.

Whatever point Kilbourne argues she backs up with vivid examples, including
pictures of ads. When she argues that ads distort women’s relationships
to food, she follows with ads for Payday candy bars (“If you don’t like
your payday, try ours”) or macaroni and cheese (“Oh baby, where have you
been all my life?”). When she explains that ads take advantage of our anxieties
to sell us products, she cites a towel ad that uses the late actor James
Dean (“Some people are born with charisma; others just buy it”).

Kilbourne’s arguments are as focused and unassailable as those of a
good prosecutor. Piece by piece, she builds a case that America has been
deeply corrupted by advertisers. She sums up the message of advertising
by parodying Kris Kristofferson: “Freedom’s just another word for something
else to buy.” Ads lead us, she says, to expect transformation via products.
They portray work, on the other hand, as a drag, self-analysis as ridiculous,
and adulthood as desperately to be avoided. They mock civic action, as
in the Miller beer ad that says, “Scientists predict global warming” and
then shows a six-pack and adds, “No problem.” She points out that ads also
steer us away from what really makes us happy— “meaningful work, authentic
relationships, and a sense of connection with history, community, nature
and the cosmos.”

Kilbourne wants to change the world, and she doesn’t apologize for it.
She argues for things like turn-off-your-television week, consumer boycotts
and letter-writing campaigns, and national groups like Annenberg School
professor George Gerbner’s Cultural Environmental Movement. While she allows
that ads don’t cause all our problems, she does argue that they give us
an environment where bad choices are constantly reinforced. Her book sounds
the call for a new protest era. I for one am ready to march.

Mary Pipher’s most recent book is Another
Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (Riverhead,
1999) (See p. 30). She belongs to the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, NE.